Every now and then, we check in with our partners and colleagues to get a sense of how quickly – or slowly – companies are moving from older versions of NAV to the latest version. Although the speed seems to be picking up, it hasn’t really improved much. Just last week, for example, a review of 8,000 installations revealed that 70% of the on-premise installations surveyed are no longer on mainstream support, meaning they are still on NAV 2009 or earlier.

Just to put this into perspective, when some of our staff first teamed up with Microsoft to deliver the hands-on labs on Report Design and Transformation in Berlin and San Diego in 2011, we did not imagine that, 5 years later, the community would only have moved a fraction of the install base and would still be dealing with this issue every day. Yet here we are.

Today, just ahead of the release of a new version of NAV in October 2016, even more installations are coming off mainstream support. With every layer of new functionality that Microsoft adds, the steps required to bring these older solutions up-to date become a bit more time-consuming, complex and costly. At the same time, the pressure to accept fixed-scope, fixed-price and fixed-delivery upgrade projects only keeps growing. Can these opposing trends be reconciled?

The upcoming launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Financials has made it very clear that the traditional way of working in Dynamics NAV has changed. A discussion is now taking place about extensions with some experts regarding extensions as a miracle cure and others taking a more cautious view, warning that extensions cannot be used for on-premises solutions due to:

The upgrade time taking longer with each version

The inability for extensions to be changed once deployed in production and

The proprietary source code preventing customers moving from one software partner to another

Marko Perisic at WPC says “The answer is extensions, now what’s the question?” so it seems clear that extensions are here to stay – the real issue is how to deal with them on the three Dynamics NAV platforms:

In the Dynamics 365 for Financials Business Edition

Some form of multi-tenant environment

In an on-premises (individual) solution

Although all these environments speak NAV, they have very different dialects, which has an impact on design, architecture and extensions. It may also result in some current partners deciding against all three platforms.Read more →

There has been a lot of talk about all the changes and initiatives from Microsoft, and how these will impact the Dynamics channel. In recent years, the entire landscape for Microsoft Dynamics has changed, as it has moved from its former shadow existence in the Microsoft technology stack to being centre stage. And it’s likely to change again with the launch of Dynamics 365, as we move further into a “cloud first, mobile first” world.

With every subsequent update in recent years, we have seen Microsoft drive more and more revenue to the cloud, and we’ve seen ever closer integration between different technologies. We have even been told at different conventions to get in the cloud or be out of business – and, while things may not have moved as quickly as we thought back then, Dynamics 365 does seem to sound like a final wake-up call.